Climate-Beneficial Fibers Were Gaining Traction. Then Trump Happened.

Yahoo

01-05-2025

From the time it kicked off in 2023, the Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership worked to do precisely that: link up a slew of stakeholders to bolster the production of so-called 'climate-smart cotton and wool to build agricultural resilience, regenerate soil health and expand economic opportunities for American growers.
This wasn't some flash-in-the-pan pilot scheme, either. Led by the National Center for Appropriate Technology and its five partners—the Carbon Cycle Institute, Colorado State University Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Fibershed, Seed2Shirt and New York Textile Lab—the project spanned 135 farms and ranches, amounting to some 2.1 million acres, across California, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
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And if ambitions were big, then so was the backing. A $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities provided enrolled producers with technical assistance, reimbursement and incentive payments to plan, verify and implement whole-farm greenhouse-gas reduction and carbon sequestration roadmaps. The goal was to sequester an estimated 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over the grant period by reducing synthetic fertilizer application, increasing soil organic matter and boosting water-holding capacity. It sought to build markets, bolster rural communities and prioritize engagement with traditionally underserved producers, particularly Black families in the southern states.
At least that was the thrust of the original five-year plan. If the freezing of already committed federal money at the outset of the second Trump administration wasn't enough to derail efforts only two years in, surely the cancellation of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities in mid-April has. While the USDA says that select projects may still qualify for review if they can demonstrate that a 'significant amount of the federal funds awarded will go to farmers,' among other things, Rebecca Burgess, executive director of Fibershed, a California nonprofit that focuses on building regional fiber systems, isn't hopeful.
'Fibershed and partners literally met all of the new requirements, minus the fact we drove 62 percent of funding versus 65 percent to growers,' she said. 'Now all partners have to reapply, which will take administrative time—meetings, agreements, document creation—and we've already done that, and so there's no efficiency in having to do the admin all over again. It took two-and-a-half years to be awarded and onboarded last time. There's nothing efficient in this approach.'
The axing of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, which the USDA says has now been 'reformed and overhauled' into the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative, was far from unexpected. President Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly excoriated the science of climate change, which he has dubbed a scam or hoax.
Since his inauguration, the White House has launched an all-out assault on the global climate consensus by halting government studies, terminating employees en masse, rolling back environmental regulations and purging references to global warming from federal websites. He has staffed his cabinet with like-minded people who share his antipathy for the previous administration and hew closely to the party line. People, in fact, like Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who referred to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities as a 'Biden-era climate slush fund.'
'The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,' Rollins said in a statement. 'The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden administration. During my short time as secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines. We are correcting these mistakes and redirecting our efforts to set our farmers up for an unprecedented era of prosperity.'
And if there's perhaps one thing the administration wants to dismantle more is any initiative bearing the whiff of 'woke' through the promotion of D.E.I., or diversity, equity and inclusion. 'Black,' 'BIPOC' and 'marginalized'—all foundational concepts for the Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership, which aimed to dedicate at least 40 percent of program benefits to producers who have traditionally been left on the sidelines—are also just some of the words that the Trump administration has ordered to swerve in grant proposals and contracts.
'When you look at the percentage of the resources that go to Black farmers across the U.S., it is staggeringly low,' said Tameka Peoples, founder of Seed2Shirt, the country's first Black-woman-owned vertically integrated apparel manufacturing and print-on-demand company. 'We're losing land at hundreds of thousands of acres a year. That is counter-social justice. That is targeting. So we need to stand up and fight for what's right as it relates to farmers who have been historically underserved and, quite frankly, left out of the larger climate conversation.'
By now, the harm from lost funds has already rippled out, washing away financial certainty that both businesses and farms rely on for long-term planning. Peoples said that the funding gap hasn't only affected the livelihoods of farmers, some of whom have been cultivating cotton for five-plus generations and 'went out on a limb' to implement the regenerative practices, but it is also an existential threat to her 10-person team.
'When you're CEO, you're like, 'O.K., well, I'll just sacrifice my stuff, and we'll figure out how long we can do this with resources in reserve,' she said. 'But at the end of the day, we would like for payment terms to be reviewed and honored.'
Even the funding pause that preceded the program's cancellation was perilous because everyone was expected to 'keep working without pay,' said Laura Sansone, who created New York Textile Lab to support regenerative farming practices through a wool purchasing cooperative in New York State called the Carbon Farming Network. When funding was still up in the air, she had to forgo compensation, even digging into her personal pockets to pay her carbon farm planner.
That the farms New York Textile Lab works with will still have their animals, and the animals will keep producing fiber, is one thing, Sansone said. Whether it'll still be able to provide the technical assistance and cost sharing to mitigate the problems of constant resource extraction is another question. More than shoring up climate resilience, she said, the Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership has been about growing 'deep roots into our communities and having direct accountability to the land and the people and the animals.'
'I don't see how we can really follow through with that; it's very difficult without the funding,' said Sansone, who also works as a textile designer. 'We're trying to build contingency plans to raise money, but this is a lot of extra work to take on. So, on top of keeping everything afloat, I will now have to pivot and try to find funding. It's difficult, but all of us in the program are going to start to lose employees. And it's the farmers who will be losing out the most.'
Hearing the government's attitude toward climate change reminds Benjamin Wood, owner of a 140-acre farm just outside Waterville, N.Y., that raises sheep and vegetables, of the story of King Canute, who 'sat on the beach and ordered the tide not to come in. It's coming in anyway.' Trying to ignore scientific reality is not only futile, in other words, but also foolhardy.
'I directly relate these animal disease problems—like the avian flu and the price of eggs—to climate change,' he said. 'I think that's a direct link. I think people need to understand that our beef cattle herd is down 20 percent because two years ago we had a serious drought in the West, and a lot of them had to be sold off, and they haven't been replaced. So all of that is going to affect our production and the price of food for the average consumer.'
The extra cash from the Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership, Wood said, helped pay for improvements that his regular income couldn't, such as new water lines, pasture reseeding and tree planting. He'll still keep doing what he was doing, but the pace will be much slower.
What's arguably worse for farmers are the whipsawing conditions driven by Trump's brewing trade war. If there's another blow they can't take at a time of rising input costs and falling commodity prices, Wood said, it's the tariffs that are already stoking price increases.
'A lot of people don't know this, but Canada really supplies us with potash, which is an important nutrient for all crops, and they're just tacking on a tariff—first 25 percent, now 10 percent—which is going to make it very expensive, which in turn, will cut down production,' he said. 'There's another 25 percent tariff on steel. That's going to raise the cost of farm machinery, which is already out of reach for a lot of people. So there are a lot of ramifications here that the normal person doesn't see.'
Tariffs nearly ruined farmers during Trump's first go-around at the presidency. The only thing that saved them from complete annihilation was a $23 billion federal bailout program. In what appeared like an acknowledgement of what went down before, the USDA announced last month that it would be shelling out up to $10 billion to agricultural growers through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program for the 2024 crop year. As far as Burgess is concerned, however, this is a short-term distraction.
'He's paying $84 an acre to cotton growers for just a one-time payment,' she said of Trump. 'Ours was a five-year catalytic grant. It was not the dole. It was about building markets that normalized climate-resilient agriculture through pricing structures and verification and certification. But this was a threatening grant to this administration, because it built an alliance between groups who are marginalized or felt marginalized and would rebalance things ever so slightly.'
What frustrates Burgess beyond the progress they were making—'you had Black farmers just starting to gain trust and conservative, more libertarian ranchers and farmers also going, 'Maybe climate beneficial isn't so bad,' she said—is that the Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership would have been stepping stone to restoring the country's decimated infrastructure for processing fiber and textiles by creating what she calls 'short-distance supply chains.' Burgess pointed to microfactories like Unspun, which is 'not coming out of China or Mexico but out of the Bay Area.'
'I'm really excited about marrying some of those vertically integrated, very high-tech, late-stage value chain technologies like Unspun and getting them the yarn they need,' she said. 'Right now, we can't produce the yarn they need from our farms, which are literally an hour-and-a-half from their technology center. So those are the things I was hoping and I'm still hoping to do.'
Heidi Barr knows the feeling. For the past five years, the PA Flax Project co-founder and CEO has been working to revive the flax-for-linen industry in Pennsylvania.
This would involve more than simply ramping up acreage for the climate-friendly plant, which requires little to no chemical inputs or irrigation and helps improve soil health through the aerating properties of its deep root system, she said. The last flax processor in the United States shuttered some 60 years ago after it was no longer able to keep pace with cheaper European and Asian imports. Recreating the infrastructure that would transform flax into linen is a much harder lift.
The bulk of the PA Flax Project's $1.7 million funding, divvied up over three years, also comes from the USDA, albeit through the Organic Market Development Grant, which is still in a holding pattern. The organization was just about to go into the mill construction stage when it learned the government would no longer be reimbursing its expenses. It's had to lay off two staff members and pause contractual work with third-party consultants. Farmers also can't plant crops without the commitment to see them through harvest.
The suspension of this work at such a crucial juncture appears at odds with the Trump administration's 'America First' policy to reshore domestic manufacturing. By 2030, the mill could provide $6 million in annual revenue, 16 full-time jobs for administration and mill employees and opportunities for at least 100 farmers in the region, perhaps even as far north as Canada.
'It's kind of a no-brainer for a very modest investment,' Barr said. 'But the other reality is that it doesn't matter, because if this funding freeze continues and we cannot raise the money to fill the gap, we will have to cease operations,' she said. 'Losing the momentum at this moment is devastating. You can't just turn the faucet back on and fill the glass. It will take time to build up again.'
Finding alternative sources of funding won't be easy. State grants are an option, though many of them are tied to larger federal aid. While private philanthropy is another option, competition will be tougher than ever. Apparel and home furnishing brands that source textiles could also step up. Indeed, retailers such as J.Crew, Everlane and Carhartt have started to sponsor American farms transitioning to climate-beneficial cotton in strategic bursts. Their role now, Peoples said, is more critical than ever.
'We just need more of them—maybe a coalition of the willing at this point,' she said. 'When you're in climate work and when you're in community work, the impact is for generations. We're talking about changing people's lives and changing lands. And so if we can't do this work anymore, the planet will suffer over time.'
Peoples doesn't want to call any brands out. That's not her style. But she wants them to know that while smallholder farmers are used to doing a lot with a little, the United States is in danger of losing them altogether. And, with that, their intentional stewardship of the land.
'I'm calling any brand in that wants to see a change in this space to be like, 'Let's figure it out and let's work together,'' she said. 'Either way, I know Seed2Shirt isn't waiting. We can't afford to. Science tells us it's getting worse, and if we don't do something now, we don't know the type of world we'll be able to hand over to our children.'